Fast external SSD and enclosure?

[mikehalloran]

Since I abandoned the thought of faster than 1000MB/s, I've also been looking around for "slower" drives. The cheapest 2TB I found was a Intel 660p M.2 2280 2TB NVMe.

From what I could gather, it's the cheapest 2TB m.2 drive I can find. It should work, right?

As long as you’ve abandoned the idea of fast, then yes, the 660p is fine. I use these in 2013–2014 iMacs and mid-2015 MBPs that have a PCIe 3 x1 slot and cannot benefit from the speed of a 970 EVO.

NVMe blades can only run High Sierra or newer. The 660p runs Mojave just fine.

If you want fast, the X5 is your only real choice.

Those external enclosures can offer more capacity, but can only match speed in RAID 0. Otherwise, they are slower. Have I mentioned that RAID 0 arrays cannot boot a Mac in Mojave?

 

[Fishrrman]

"Can you tell us what enclosure you are using? Is it successful? Saw a review of the SSD and said it wasn’t compatible with Mojave"

My report can be found here:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/do-it-yourself-usb3-1-gen2-drive.2192509/

 

[mikehalloran]

The Crucial P1 and the Intel 660p are nearly identical in performance. Both are compatible with Mojave—not sure why some review would say otherwise (firmware in the earliest ones?). The P1 tops out at 1TB while the 660p is available up to 2TB. Good, inexpensive NVMe 3 x4 blades but capable of only 2/3 the speed of a 970 EVO or WD Black 3D.

Lately, the 1TB 660p is a little less expensive than the P1 but I’ve used both when I can’t talk a client into 2TB where the 660p is the only choice.

In a USB 3.1 enclosure, this won’t matter since that—not the blade— is the bottleneck.